Benny & Shrimp (5 page)

I was standing there in the library, talking to a cross
little
girl who thought Snow White was stupid. “Fancy not recognising her own stepmother when she turned up with that apple! Useless!” she said. We laughed.

Someone thumped me on the shoulder. It felt like the long arm of the law, but it was the Forest Owner! He was wearing his usual loud quilted jacket, but he’d taken off his cap and his forehead was hidden by springy curls of dusty, yellow hair.

He looked angry, spitting out some unintelligible reproach in a demanding tone. I assumed he was
complaining
I hadn’t tended the grave properly, and it took me a few moments to realise he was looking for a book.

“Ask at the information desk, I’m at lunch!” I snapped.

His face twitched uncontrollably. Then he asked if I fancied coming along to the cemetery with him.

The little girl was watching him with interest.

And suddenly I realised there was something I’d entirely misunderstood and lots more I didn’t know at all.

So we went out and had lunch. He put away
fantastic
amounts of stew and beetroot and bread, and slurped a bit when he drank his milk, but I just sat there basking in the warmth of his smile. With his cap off and his face alive with attentiveness, he didn’t look dreary, or well into middle age, just very real. And that hair was bewitching, there was no other word for it.

We chatted in a cheerful, random sort of way, and didn’t say a word about Kristeva and Lacan – as far as I can recall we talked about Father Christmasses, the
various
stages of casting concrete, yellow buntings, St. Peter’s and big toe nails. He was so quick on the uptake it almost felt like telepathy.

I told him it was my birthday, and he seemed
somehow
to know I hadn’t had any presents.

“You’re coming with me!” he said, pulling on his cap and getting me into my coat in a decisive, manly way. Then he marched me off to the Domus department store and started buying birthday presents. He didn’t ask me what I wanted, just told me to shut my eyes whenever he made up his mind about something. We visited all three floors and ended up in the coffee shop,
where we ordered some cakes.

He spread all the carefully gift-wrapped parcels on the table and looked at me expectantly. I went at them with an eagerness that wasn’t in the least faked, ripping them open one after another and exclaiming, “Ohhh!”, “Wow!” and “You shouldn’t have!”

On the ground floor he’d bought a pair of Mickey Mouse earrings; a butterfly-shaped soap; and some mauve tights. On the next floor, a shiny red ball; a poster with the silhouette of a loving couple hand in hand in a giant shell, sailing across the sea into the
sunset
; and a cap just as ghastly as the one he wears, but without the “Forest Owners’ Alliance” logo.

In the last parcel there was a mouth organ.

“Can you play the mouth organ?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Good! Me neither! I knew we must have something in common!” he beamed.

He was about to stab his fork into his third cake when his whole body stiffened. He’d caught sight of his watch.

“I’ve got to go,” he cried. “I should have been back ages ago.”

At that he leapt up, scattering paper and presents all over the place, and strode off to the escalator. Just as he was stepping onto it he turned round.

“What’s your name?” he bellowed.

I felt a real fool shouting back “Desiréeeeeee!” Customers’ jaws went dropping into their trolleys all around.

“Whaaaat?” I heard from the escalator, but then he was gone.

“And you’re Cinderella, I suppose,” I muttered into my cake. “Better hold onto your boots!”

There was an odd atmosphere in the library staffroom when I got back, three hours late and without any marzipan gateau.

It cost me dear. No, not the presents – but when I got to the cowshed an hour and a half late for milking, the cows were all bellowing at me. They’d eaten up all the feed and been lying in the shit and were so unsettled it took me several hours to deal with them. It was only when I switched on the washer afterwards that I realised the milk from a cow that had just had penicillin had gone into the tank with all the rest, and that could only mean one thing: I’d have to throw away
twenty-four-hours
’ worth of milk production, and quite apart from it costing me thousands of kronor I couldn’t afford, I’d have to spend several more hours getting rid of the milk. But it was worth it. Definitely.

The only other time I did something as disastrous as
that, I was fifteen. Mum worked as a home help in those days, and I used to do the afternoon milking when I got in from school. We had a big end-of-year maths exam coming up and I was worried about getting good marks for my report and was brooding on some theorem. You mustn’t do that. Farmers need to be as alert as fighter pilots every minute of the day, Dad used to say. Otherwise they find themselves under a speeding
tractor
or with a horn through their guts, or they slice their thigh with the power saw. We had to tip away seven
hundred
litres that time; Dad went and stuck his head in the water butt, but he didn’t say much. I know he blamed himself all his life for me losing my fingers in the
circular
saw when I was four.

Not that my good marks in maths did me much good. When Dad died, I left school and took over his job. Mum didn’t want me to; she’d rather have given up the farm, she said, although it had been passed down through her family. I made up my mind one summer night when I saw her sitting under the big rowan in front of the house with her arm around the trunk,
staring
out over the grassy bank.

And I felt like one hell of a guy when my old
classmates
came round to see me and I screeched into the yard on the big tractor, jumped out in my steel-capped cowshed boots and spat chewing snuff in all directions. We managed, with Granddad’s help. And then he died and I had fewer and fewer visitors. I expect they got tired of me always being out working when they came, and even when they did get to see me, all I talked about
was carcass weights and pulpwood prices. I understand how they felt.

Right, time to pull my socks up. Check which cows are on heat – I can’t afford to miss any. Got to clean the harrow before it clogs up entirely. Ring the vet. And the bank, tomorrow. I’m behind with the book-keeping. And almost out of wood.

Freezing cold in the house – I didn’t have time to light the stove before I went to the cowshed. It’ll be an hour before I can have a shower. First thing tomorrow I’ll have to chop some more wood before I see to the cows. So I can have a shower after I’ve done the
morning
milking. Because I’m going into town to find her again and that’s that. No, bugger it! Tomorrow I’ve got the inseminator and the vet coming, and I never know when to expect them. Damn!

I didn’t have time to do any food shopping, either. What’s left in that tin of herring I opened ages ago probably isn’t fit for human consumption – and if I keeled over and died of botulism she’d never even know! Because she doesn’t know my name! Would she wonder why I never got in touch again?

But I know her name, all right! Or at least, I sort of do. Holding a bit of soggy crispbread spread with almost rancid butter in one hand, I start looking up Wallin in the phone book.

There are eight of them, but none with girls’ names. There’s a D. Wallin with an address in Kofferdist Road – I couldn’t make out what she was saying when she shouted her name. but it sounded like something
beginning with “D”. Only the Prize Saddo of all Sweden would ring a person they don’t know and ask to speak to “somebody beginning with D”.

But I’ll drive in on Friday, in time for lunch.

Aargh! Friday – I’ve got the test milking and the milk recorder’s coming. Bugger!

I wake up the next morning on the settee in the sitting room with a half-eaten crispbread in my hand and a grin plastered across my face.

When I got home, I kicked off my shoes and jumped up onto the sofa and pulled down a Käthe Kollwitz
reproduction
that used to be Örjan’s pride and joy. It was a charcoal sketch of a tired-looking woman crying. Then I pinned up the poster of the couple in the seashell.

Next, I took off my dress and put on the Mickey Mouse earrings and the mauve tights and poured a glass of mulled wine (cold) and drank a toast to myself. It was the only alcohol I had in the house.

And I spent the whole evening in that outfit, trying to teach myself “Jingle Bells” on the mouth organ and letting my thoughts come and go. Finally I went out to the bathroom and took a long, hot bath, splashing around in the water with the red ball and stroking my
skin with the butterfly soap.

I’ve had worse birthdays!

Then just as I’d dropped off to sleep, the phone rang. How did he get my number? was my first thought. But it was Märta, from Copenhagen. She wished me a happy birthday and said she was sorry she hadn’t been able to ring earlier. Apparently she and Robert had been taken in for questioning by the police for some obscure
reason
; she couldn’t go into details because she was still at the police station. I was answering her distractedly and eventually she noticed.

“So it’s happened!” she said. Märta’s senses are as keen as a foxhound’s, at least where everybody except herself is concerned.

“I’ve met the boy next door. That’s to say, the grave next door!” I giggled.

For once she was struck dumb. Then somebody barked something in Danish and the line went dead.

He didn’t come to the library on Thursday. I dropped a tray of index cards and deleted an important
computer
file.

He didn’t come on Friday, either. I took off the Mickey Mouse earrings at lunchtime. Lilian laughed at them and said they weren’t really my style, if I didn’t mind her saying. I laughed too, and said they were a present from one of the storytime children.

It was almost true.

About three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Olof
handed
me a telephone receiver. “Somebody wanting to speak to ‘a Miss Wallin’,” he said. “I suppose that’s you.”

My stomach cramped as if I’d eaten something that disagreed with me. My fingers were slippery on the receiver.

“Yes, Desirée Wallin?”

“Desirée?” he said. He had a strong local accent, so it sounded rather like “deyziray”. But it was definitely him. I recognised the voice now.

“My name’s Benny. Benny Söderström. I just took a chance on it being Wallin. From the gravestone.”

“Yes.”

“Can you meet me tomorrow? At the cemetery gate, about one?”

“Yes,” I answered in another monosyllable. Quite the chatterbox.

It all went quiet.

“I can play ‘Jingle Bells’ now,” I said.

“Bring the mouth organ with you then, and you can teach me!”

“Is that allowed, playing a mouth organ in the
cemetery
?”

“The residents don’t tend to complain. And then we can go for something to eat. I haven’t been able to get anything down for two days.”

“Nor me.”

“Good!” He rang off abruptly.

Olof was observing me closely. It must have been rather odd listening to my end of the conversation. Then he smiled sadly and patted me on the cheek. Life has made some impression on him, then. He recognises a confused teenager when he sees one.

I knocked a box of disks onto the floor and sat down suddenly when I went to pick them up. And just couldn’t stop laughing.